Nearly everything has a philosophy, and the VR Juggler build system is no different. The build system philosophy has evolved from the following observation: programmers think more about writing their code than about compiling it. Compiling takes time that could be spent writing code, so compiling must be fast. Command-line arguments have little to do with code, and thus they are easily forgotten. Paths to external dependencies are esoteric file system thingies that are never referenced in code. Because of these points, the basic philosophy of the VR Juggler build system and of Doozer++ in general is simple: automate everything.

Automation in a build system means doing as much as possible to avoid requiring programmers to type anything beyond the following familiar command:

configure ; make ; make install

Whether this is always possible is highly debatable, but either way, it should always be the goal. If the above cannot be achieved, some mechanism must exist so that programmers feel as though that is all they ever have to type.

There is much more to the philosophy of the VR Juggler build system than just automation, but someone looking at the code would see that steps to automate configuration and compilation make up a sizable percentage of the total line count. Beyond simplifying the process of building, we also have the goal of simplifying extensions to the build system.

Unfortunately, repeated experience has shown that no amount of simplification is enough to satisfy even the most patient of users. This hearkens back to the original point stating that programmers focus more on writing their code than on compiling it. A build system is always going to be foreign to the majority of the people on any given team, and taking the time to learn and understand a build system takes up valuable coding time. Despite these bleak statements, it is possible to put together a build system that requires little effort to extend when a new file must be compiled or a new source directory is added. Those who hope for more than this are likely to be let down.

More details on the goals of Doozer++ and the VR Juggler build system are provided in the next chapter. All of these goals are founded by the philosophy discussed above.